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Only the good Don Young

Eve Peyser has an interesting piece on the growing bipartisan consensus to legalize marijuana, and the most surprising part is that the very rightwing Don Young is on board.

But when I meet Don Young, the 83-year-old Republican congressman from Alaska, he gets more personal. "I, very frankly, I don't use [marijuana]. I have not used it. A lot of my in-laws use it. So far it's been good. In a sense, it's less violent than alcohol," he tells me. "A lot of people forget that. Alcohol can cause real mental problems."

...As soon as Young begins talking about weed--or rather "cannabis," as he corrects me--as it relates to his family and alcohol, we're on the same page, a feeling I certainly did not anticipate.

...I never binge-drank because I loved alcohol--I did so because I really wanted to get fucked up, and it was the substance most available to me. When I finally decided to quit doing something I had indulged in every single day for years, the addict inside me didn't suddenly wither away. I didn't suddenly start hating drugs. I just realized there was an alternative, a way outside of the anxiety of sobriety that wasn't going to absolutely annihilate me. And that alternative was weed.

I understand this is not everyone's experience with the drug, but this narrative is not uncommon, and I share this view with Don Young, of all people. "You have to understand that I live with American Indians. That's my home. That's my wife," the Alaska congressman tells me. "Marijuana is a lot better than alcohol. I want to stress that because alcohol creates violence, and I've seen great people cut somebody's head off drunk. You don't see that with marijuana. I'm not condoning it. I'm saying that was the effect upon them, and now they smoke."

By fnord12 | April 21, 2017, 3:00 PM | Liberal Outrage